a life well lived

    Florczak, Robert. Errol Flynn: the illustrated life chronology. Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2022. Summary: "Though there have been myriad books on Errol Flynn - scores of biographies, film studies, analyses, etc. - there has never been one that unfurls his dashing life day-by-day, predominantly through photos, letters, news clippings, and documents. This book does so: from Flynn's birth in Hobart, Australia in 1909 through to his death in Vancouver, Canada in 1959. Culled from over 11,000 images in the author's personal collection (many rarely or never before published), from the author's own travels around the world to photograph locations key to Flynn's life, and with text gathered from four years research in the Warner Bros. Archives, the USC Cinematic Arts Library, and the Margaret Herrick Library. Flynn's colorful life was lived out on the world stage and a better candidate for a book of this style would be hard to find." [provided by the publisher].


    With the possible exception of Marilyn Monroe, more books have been written about Errol Flynn than any other film actor. Alas, biographers have not always been generous or forgiving. Indeed, in the first four decades or so after his death most of the Flynn literature focused on the more sensationalist aspects of his life and career, tarring him with a broad brushstroke: lecher, alcoholic, deadbeat, drug addict, Nazi sympathizer, connoisseur of underage girls, and all around out-of-control hedonist. Few public figures have had such a checkered afterlife. Lost in all the lurid, and largely unsubstantiated, haze was anything meaningful about Flynn the actor, or the writer [1].
    But around the year 2000 things began to change, and it’s probably no coincidence that about this time new forms of technology, principally the DVD and the Internet, were just beginning to hit their stride. In the meantime a few pro-Flynn books appeared, including the first scholarly biography [2]. Another factor was the Flynn centenary of 2009, which helped keep the momentum going, and a few years later there was the generally sympathetic portrayal in the film The Last of Robin Hood. Today there are numerous blogs and fan pages, and perhaps more important, DVDs that have been issued which represent a huge swath of the Flynn oeuvre, all of which give us a more rounded portrait of the man and artist.
    Packed full of letters, telegrams, notes, diary entries, receipts, cables, memos, images and various other memorabilia, The Illustrated Life Chronology is more a huge scrapbook, lovingly collected and organized, than a coffee table book or conventional biography. Author Florczak is to be commended for yeoman service in what was obviously a labor of love. While the book is vaguely pro-Flynn, Florczak doesn’t play the role of apologist or vilifier, rather he lets the material speak for itself, and likewise lets the man literally speak for himself. Especially welcome are the images, which include posters of all the films. Also of note are the many informal photos of Flynn and friends, associates and family, which capture Flynn in more candid moments. The rich detail provides aspects of Flynn's life that aren't so well covered: to wit, it struck me how often he was ill and thus the work on a film had to be shut down while he recuperated. This is surprising in view of his athletic, energetic screen image.
    It would be misleading to say that with the present book the long overdue rehabilitation of Errol Flynn is complete. No such thing; he was a man of many shadings and complexities, and it's just too tempting for biographers and commentators to focus on the lurid and scandalous aspects of his life and career. Then again, all the huffing and puffing may be to some extent moot. As  author Florczak points out, for all the fame in his lifetime and the more recent comeback, if you will, he remains a marginal figure in comparison to his better known contemporaries. Perhaps the explanation is Flynn's (in his later years) dissolute public persona, or that he was never taken seriously as an actor, or that the heroic swashbuckler film has gone out of fashion (when a swashbuckler movie does get made these days, it tends to be parody). Whatever the case, the present volume is in its modest way a corrective, and as such allows us to better appreciate as a human being and artist the phenomenon that was Errol Flynn. In short Errol Flynn: the Illustrated Life Chronology is catnip for Flynn fans and will appeal to anyone interested in golden age Hollywood.

    1 An exception to this rather tawdry history was, ironically enough, Flynn’s own autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, published only a few months after his death. Admittedly of dubious accuracy in many of the details, nonetheless the book has a spiritual truth and honesty as it captures the voice and panache of the man himself. And it isn’t totally self-serving: Flynn recalls with relish, sometimes a little too much relish, the more rascally side of his personality. Still, Wicked Ways remains the most exuberant and entertaining biography of a film actor to date, perhaps of any Hollywood personality.
     Aside: In the first sentence of the post I opine that more books have been written about Errol Flynn than any other actor, Marilyn Monroe conspicuously excepted. However, we must also note Orson Welles, who has had lots of books written about him, though they tend to focus more on his work as a director than as an actor.    
    2 Thomas McNulty, Errol Flynn: the Life and Career, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.

brief candles: Lola Montez (1821-1861)

    Lola Montès [videorecording (DVD)]. Gamma-Film prèsente un film de Max Ophuls; scenario de Max Ophuls; adaptation de Annette Wademant et Max Ophuls; dialogue de Jacques Natanson; une co-production Gamma, Florida, Union Films; producteur délégué, Albert Caraco. Criterion Collection, 2009. 2 videodiscs (114 min.). Based on the novel by Cécil Saint-Laurent. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1955.

   Performers: Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov, Anton Walbrook, Henry Guisol, Lise Delamare, Paulette Dubost, Oskar Werner, Jean Galland, Will Quadflieg, Helena Manson, Germaine Delbat, Jacques Fayet, Friedrich Domin, Werner Finck, Ivan Desny. Summary: The life of the notorious showgirl who had affairs with kings, became a courtesan, and traveled the world trying to fit in. Charts the course of Montès's scandalous past through the invocations of the bombastic ringmaster of the American circus where she has ended up performing


whatever Lola wants ...

   The woman we know today as Lola  Montez was actually of impeccable British pedigree, having been born in Ireland as Eliza Rosanna Gilbert to well-to-do upper middle class parents: her father was a career officer in the King’s army and her mother’s father a member of Parliament. Most decidedly she did not descend from a Spanish noble family, as she later would claim. But somehow along the way the deception stuck, and she metamorphosed, spectacularly, into the more modish and exotic identity of ‘Lola Montez.’

   She was best known as a notorious dancer but from all accounts wasn’t very good. As if to compensate she cometimes danced naked. She was also an actress but apparently couldn’t act. More to the point, she was the century’s most notorious femme fatale before the term existed. Indeed some sources say the phrase had to be invented to describe Lola.

   If contemporary portraits and vintage photographs are any indication she was an attractive woman but not really a great beauty, at least by Twentieth and Twenty-first Century ideals of female physical perfection. But like Cleopatra she had something that inspired various male suitors – rich, famous and otherwise – to seek out her company, often with unfortunate consequences for the suitor, Lola too sometimes. Anyhow, and to invoke Twentieth Century comparisons further, Lola might be described as a Nineteenth Century version of Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page and Eva Peron all rolled into one, with more than a touch of the Gabor sisters. In a word she was famous for being famous.

   Accordingly Lola’s life had numerous permutations, convolutions, confluences and connections. Classical music buffs glimpse her as one of Franz Liszt’s many amours. Other liaisons included author Alexander Dumas, newspaper publisher Alexandre Dujarier, and King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Herein another, albeit tenuous, connection with Liszt. Ludwig’s grandson, later King Ludwig II, was a near fanatical admirer of Richard Wagner’s operas. Wagner just happened to be Liszt’s son-in-law, having married Liszt’s daughter Cosima. Indeed some sources claim that Lola had a fling with Wagner himself, though this is doubtful. By all accounts Wagner met Lola only briefly and didn’t much like her.

   Her liaison with Ludwig I created a furor at court and resulted in the king’s eventual abdication. Thus with her star fading fast in Europe Lola in the early 1850s moved to America and eventually made her way to the bawdy environs of San Francisco in the Gold Rush days. Lola was an immediate succès de scandale in America, with one of the more sensationalist stories about her being, apropos her fiery ‘Latin’ temperament, that she whipped a German policeman who had offended her. She later disowned the story but it’s a great story all the same, so much so that she always carried the horse-whip onstage during performances to discourage men from treating her disrespectfully. As her popularity waned she took her shtick to smaller mining towns in northern California and eventually made a tour of Australia.

   Lola returned to the United States again in 1856. At this point, only 34 years old and in poor health she turned to spirituality and lived quietly in New York, mostly doing charity work for homeless women, until her death from complications of pneumonia and syphilis at age 39 in 1861.

   Lola’s tempestuous life and career has been essayed by most every art form and entertainment medium, but film connoisseurs best remember her from the 1955 widescreen extravaganza Lola Montès, directed by legendary German auteur Max Ophuls, with Martine Carol in the title role.

   Mirroring the woman herself the film Lola Montès has had a bumpy evolution. From its riotous, scandalous premieres in 1955 – accompanied by mixed, mostly negative, reviews – to its gradual comeback, it has survived various studio-imposed cuts and revisions, finally receiving a glorious and much deserved full restoration in 2008. Still, Lola has polarized fans and critics since its first screening nearly seven decades ago. Jacques Rivette and Francois Truffaut praised the film on its initial release, and in 1963 the eminent American critic Andrew Sarris famously proclaimed it the greatest movie of all time [1], surely an exaggeration but not that far off the mark. Moreover Lola is getting further, more recent, critical love: in 2012 the film received five votes in the BFI/Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, which might place it as a low grade honorable mention but nonetheless a sign of its growing critical acceptance.

   Today Ophuls is the cult director par excellence and Lola Montès his cult movie of choice by devotees (even if his The Earrings of Madame de … remains the critical darling). Indeed if we grant that Lola Montès is an art movie then it’s not hyperbole to describe it as one of the half dozen or so greatest art movies ever.
   Hitherto best known for appearing in French boudoir farces in the 1950s, Martine Carol is the perfect embodiment of Lola, a little too much as it turned out. As though providence itself had been tempted Miss Carol was struck down by cardiac arrest in 1967 at the youthful age of forty-six.

[1] Mr. Sarris seems to have had second thoughts given his subsequent reflections on the ‘greatest films.’